CYC Education Accreditation Task Force

Minutes of teleconference meeting

May 27, 2008

Participants: Heather Modlin, Varda Mann-Feder, Gerrard Bellefeuille, Bruce Hardy, Carol Stuart, Roy Ferguson

1. Approval of minutes of meeting of April 28/08

The minutes of the last meeting were not yet circulated and the extenuating circumstances that created the problem were explained. These minutes will be approved at the next meeting of the Task Force.

2. Approval of the agenda

The agenda was approved as presented.

3. Business arising

3.1 Funding:

  • Roy indicated that he had not received a response to his inquiries to HRSDC and Council of Ministers of Education because they were submitted at the end of a fiscal year and the parameters of the new fiscal year within the federal government are not yet clear
  • Carol noted that she will be in Ottawa from June 25-27 and will explore whom she might be able to talk to about funding for the project. Hopefully, Roy will have received some response from the sectors he contacted by then so they can be followed up on.
  • Bruce noted that in BC the government is approaching an election and will likely be looking for some good news scenarios. Since BC has taken the lead in Canada on mandatory service agency accreditation, he thought that they might be now interested in also taking the lead in educational program accreditation and examining how this links with service agency accreditation.

ACTION: Roy will explore again within the Ministry of Children and Family Development the potential for interest in funding for the project taking into account that the political motivation of the government may have shifted since the last time. Carol will also try again to find funding in Ontario.

4. New business

4.1 Educator’s day at national and international conferences

  • The Educator’s day at the PEI conference will be on October 7 and the Task Force was asked by the conference administration to take the leadership on setting it up.
  • It was decided to make the session half day in duration (afternoon) and to focus on providing an overview and update on the Accreditation project.
  • The format would be one of encouraging active participation of persons attending. Accordingly, participants will be asked to come prepared to indicate what is happening in their area in regards to educational program accreditation. We would seek to create a dialogue with session participants in regards to what the Task Force is doing and how our plans might best work in their particular areas. A suggestion was to end the day with looking at how this session might link to a subsequent Educator’s Day at the International conference in Florida.
  • Varda has offered to coordinate the Educator’s Day in Florida. One part of the day can be for and update on the accreditation project. There will need to be other topics presented and Varda will check with Carol Kelly and Dale Currie to see if they want to have a session in Florida that follows up on their work on mentoring the next generation of practitioners and educators within the CYC field.

ACTION: Heather will contact David at the PEI conference to outline our plans for Educator’s Day on Oct. 7.

ACTION: Varda will contact Carol Kelly and Dale Currie about presenting at the Florida conference Educator’s Day.

4.2 Task force Wiki

  • The Wiki that Carol created is user-friendly and it appears that it will be a useful repository for Task Force documents. It was decided to create specific sidebar folders for documents such as accreditation documents and Task Force meeting minutes

ACTION: All members will collect contacts in their areas and add them to a master list that, hopefully, can be located on the Wiki

ACTION: Carol will set up specific sidebar folders. She will explore whether a master agency/program/ association contact list can be set up on the Wiki so that it can only be accessed by Task Force members.

ACTION: Roy will distribute minutes by email and will then place minutes into the specified folder in the Wiki. He will also place powerpoint presentation on accreditation that was prepared for Montreal conference in the documents folder on the Wiki as well as any electronic documents that he has on accreditation models.

ACTION: Bruce will add COA and CARF links to Wiki

5. Other

5.1 FICHE

  • Varda noted that she has been invited to join the FICHE editorial board and that she is going to the next meeting and will explore for what work on educational accreditation has been done in Europe. A replacement for the Canadian FICHE representative will need to be found as Jim Anglin is stepping down. Heather indicated that the Canadian Association would be interested in membership in FICHE but the fee ($2-3K) is prohibitive.

6. Next meeting.

The next conference meeting will occur on Monday, July 7 at the same regional times as the current one. Members are reminded that this meeting will be an exploration of using the videoconference capabilities of Skype. The current audio Skype conference meeting worked very well and it will be interesting to see what the video capabilities are.

RVF/ 05.30.08